3 Tools You Should Stop Using Right Now

To be honest, some of them are really good. They are not spammy, and they hold up to their promises.

And still – you shouldn’t use them.

I’m not a Luddite, quite the opposite. I’ve got nothing against marketing automation. I’ve used many automation tools and I’m a big fan of some. And still I got a recent cleanse from most of them. Sorry, I’m not going to share the specific names here, but if you’re in marketing you’ll recognize them all. Here are the tools you should get rid of:

1. Tools that Share Content You’ve Never Read Before

Here’s a confession. Until recently I used a tool to post curated articles on Twitter on my behalf. The service was good and over time, I saw nice followers growth. But as I saw the numbers pile up, I started realizing that’s not what I want. Here’s why:

I shared articles I didn’t read. I didn’t know if they were good or bad, and whether I agree with their saying or not.

I shared one tweet I hated. It was a promotional tweet for the service itself, which for me was crossing the line. I deleted it minutes after it was posted on my behalf.

More people followed me after every article I shared, but we never interacted afterwards.

This kind of tools became very popular lately. The content they share is carefully curated, and they are very convenient to use. They help you grow your followers base but nothing more than that. You shouldn’t expect better engagement rate or gaining influence in your niche while using these services. If people are not interacting with you, what difference does it make to have more of them?

2. Instagram Followers Automation Software

A client of ours recently asked us for a quick advice. An influencer approached the client and ask to collaborate with her agency. She asked us to check whether her profile’s engagement rates were real or fake.

The influencer’s photos seemed genuine and her numbers were impressive. Tens of thousands of followers, hundreds of likes per photo. And all this with just a few months old account. We looked into her Instagram demographics and full profile analysis, and as you can imagine these accomplishments weren’t gained authentically.

A simple Google search will offer you many Instagram automation software – that you just shouldn’t use.

These tools follow other Instagram accounts, hoping that some of them will follow back. It works. The followers’ counter grows, but nothing more than that.

Instagram recently announced a drastic change in its feed. The new algorithmic feed will be ordered by the likelihood of your interest in the content. Automating Instagram likes and follows will surely get you down the feed. With more indifferent people following your content, the engagement level per photo will go downhill, and so is the likelihood that people will see your content.

3. Recycling Tweets Automation

This one is particularly common with self-proclaimed social media gurus. Recycling tweets is a way of reusing content that proved to be attractive to your audience. These tools take tweets you’ve shared before and reshare it time and time again.

There’s nothing wrong with sharing the same content several times, as long as you’re in control and aware of what you reshare. It happened to me more than once that I clicked a link and found an article that was more than a year old and the content was outdated.

The next thing I did was unfollowing the person who shared it. His automation process didn’t value my time and attention as precious enough. So I walked away. Would you act differently?

Choose Automation that Keeps you Social

This blog post isn’t against automation. Some social media automation is a must and we can not live without it.

But tools that don’t support your genuine growth and help you build an active audience hurt you.

Falling into these traps is easy. You see phantom results and make yourself believe they got something to do with you. Don’t follow blindly growing numbers that got nothing to do with real people’s engagements.